Some of us will be joining Mr. Dave Local on the Radio One show The Local this evening from 7pm. Tune in on 91FM in the Dunedin area or streaming at http://www.r1.co.nz for a few nice little live numbers and our picks from the local garden. Feel free to call in and offer your undying love.

Very excited to finally be getting my cold, greedy little hands on the album today! Shouldn’t really be bloggin’ about it from work, but I need a break from sloshing pixels around.

Things are gearing up very nicely for the release party on Saturday, and although we’re sad that The Rustles have had to pull out due to injury, we’re still looking forward to a great night. The last week has been a rush of last-minute organisation and tweaking, as well as rehearsals. And in the middle of it all I’ve somehow injured my back. A little more seriously than normal: One or more slipped discs. I’ll be fine for Saturday though, I’m doing my recovery exercises and I have emergency medication.

Let it be noted that I use the term “dear” with a distinct lack of sincerity. You have never really been dear to me: Not back in the 80s when I deposited my 50 cent piece in your low-interest kiddy account; not when you ceased to be that entity and became the Frankenstein’s monster that you are now; not when I lived in an apartment building with a small mailbox and you never delivered anything, and when I went to pick things up, you could never find them; not when you sold my new address to various spam generators just because I foolishly was trusting enough to use your change-of-address “service”; and certainly not now.

Why not now? Well, let me put it this way: When a lovely person decides that they will try and make your birthday special by sending a series of items in the mail, the effect is ruined when half of them go missing.

In fact, this just makes me extremely nervous.

How many presents did you steal from me, or lose? I shudder to think.

You’re going on my list. This week, it’s you and the Dunedin City Council.

It’s been a busy couple of days. Most importantly, Lucinda has finished off the artwork and Tom has finished the mastering, and all elements of the album are with the manufacturer. This should mean they’re back in time for the release – I’ll cross my fingers.

I also knocked up a sneaky polish for the dunedinmusic.com store. It’s just a visual thing really, but it’s quite nice. I threw some ideas around for a while and settled on an implementation of MooFlow, a MooTools-based CoverFlow clone. MooFlow is very nice, but I did have a couple of issues – it’s only at version 0.2 after all.

Out of the “box” MooFlow is not set up to take single-clicks – it assumes single clicks are used for navigating through the stack. My other problem was that with the number of items in our “flow”, the knob turned into half a knob.
If anyone is interested, to solve the first issue, I inserted a click handler before the default MooFlow one. All this new handler does is check if the clicked item is already in the centre of the “flow” and if so, launches the associated URL (it was simple enough to tell MooFlow to attach an href to its image objects, which it draws from an href attribute on the img tag that it turns into the MooFlow object). If the object isn’t in the centre, then it simply calls the normal click handler, which flicks it to the centre.
The second issue was a simple bug with the calculation MooFlow uses to set the knob width. Just like a normal window, the knob width is related to the window content – so the more content, the smaller the knob, down to a certain minimum usable width. Unfortunately, MooFlow did not have a check in it that told it not to try and make the knob more narrow than it would make sense to be. A simple bug, and a simple fix.
I’m not sure if it’s kosher to post my fixed code here, it is after all not my project. However, if anybody needs it, please contact me and I’d be happy to pass on the code. I will also be donating to the MooFlow developer on behalf of dunedinmusic.com – it’s a nice little add-on, and very easy to use.

Sex with Bowie made the number one spot on Christchurch bNet radio station RDU’s top ten this week. This is cool for a couple of reasons. One, they’re friends – the masterminds behind SWB also played on my album, and one is both the namer of that track and a current member of the Sunley Band – and two, as Chris writes, it’s “pretty awesome that a song which we wrote and recorded within 2 hours for $0 (and where I clearly mess up the drum beat during the intro) is getting some airplay.” Anyway, go check them out on Last.fm
I can remember a time, not so long ago, when Christchurch wasn’t interested in anyone waving a guitar around. I guess that sort of thing goes in cycles… although a few of the city’s high-profile “urban” (forgive the term) acts have moved away from the area now. I don’t know what that says. I hope this means there will be a whole bunch of open-minded Christrchurchians making the journey through the tunnel to Lyttleton when we visit in September.

As I write this, I’m listening through some test-masters of the Sunley album. Sounding pretty exciting! In other news, I forgot to book an appointment for a haircut today, again, despite an explicit reminder. I did, however, remember to book the flights for September’s Sunley Band tour.